The death of Yan Hui produces the most emotionally unguarded passages in the Analects. Confucius cries out that Heaven is destroying him, twice. He weeps with such violence that his followers tell him he is exceeding proper restraint, and he replies asking whether he is showing excess — and that if not for this man, then for whom. The sequence is instructive about the tradition's actual relationship to ritual constraint: the master of li breaches it in grief, is told so, and does not retract. The same chapter also records him refusing to sell his carriage to provide Yan Hui with an outer coffin, on the grounds that as a former officer of the state he was not permitted to go on foot, and that his own son had been buried without one — a piece of decorum that reads coldly beside the weeping and is preserved alongside it without any attempt at reconciliation. The compilers included both, which is one of the better arguments for the text's honesty.